Pride cometh

A 50% score is usually par for me in an Open, so I tried not to be too down about the first day's play. I just needed to win both games on the Sunday, presumably against lower seeds, and all would be forgiven. For round 4 I had a double white, and time to prepare for a nice line of the French.

I'd played Oliver Howell (158) in the dim and distant past, unconvincingly hacking him up in a King's Indian, but we've both improved a bit since then. If I'd had black then I'd have been wondering why such a tactical player plays flank openings, but since I had white both players were on their own turf - I wanted to finish off a theoretical debate begun at the 4NCL. I missed my chance, and eventually paid the price for continuing to play as if he had done something incorrect:

If I lost in round 1 because a GM did what GMs do, and lost in round 2 because I was lazy, then this defeat (bringing me up to as many losses with white in 24 hours as I had in the preceding six months!) was down to a loss of objectivity.

I'm currently reading Jacob Aagaard's much-heralded Thinking Inside the Box (a very thought-provoking book which I highly recommend) and got the answer I sort of already knew to my 'chessboard policeman' dilemma: an opponent's dodgy moves can be contagious if you don't stay alert! Perhaps I'm unduly influenced by the frankly ridiculous play in the stem game, but I find the 11... Nc6 line, not to mention an early ...d4, very suspicious. Yet it's easy to build compelling arguments against 15. f4, 18. Ng3 and 26. Rb4, which all boil down to me overestimating my chances and not taking Black's ideas seriously. My tactical oversights at the moment are usually of opponents' moves rather than my own - 31... Rd8, for example - which is odd for a player who is normally so cowardly.

That bye on Saturday night was starting to look like a good idea, but I still had one chance to avoid being bagelled for the second time ever, so soon after the first.